Facebook Begins Building Its Own Data Center in Oregon

Facebook, now with over 350 million users, is showing no signs of slowing growth. While Facebook is technically still a startup company, its overall size and traffic volume puts Facebook in the same league as some of the biggest sites on the web. When you consider that fact, it’s pretty incredible that they have continued to get away without having their own data center. That’s about to change.

According to the Facebook blog, Prineville, Oregon, will be the location of Facebook’s first custom data center. Below is an image of the artists rendering of what the building will look like when completed.

So why Oregon? Besides the fact other large companies have chosen Oregon as the location for their data centers (like Amazon and Google), the state also offers cheap power, a cooler climate and tax incentives for companies to build these centers there.

Here are a few of the energy saving techniques Facebook plans to implement in the new facility:

• Evaporative cooling system: This system evaporates water to cool the incoming air. This process is highly energy efficient and minimizes water consumption by using outside air.
• Airside economizer: The facility will be cooled by simply bringing in colder air from the outside. This feature will operate for between 60 percent and 70 percent of the year. The remainder of the year requires the use of the evaporative cooling system to meet temperature and humidity requirements.
• Re-use of server heat: A portion of the excess heat created by the computer servers will be captured and used to heat office space in the facility during the colder months.
• Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology: All data centers must have an uninterruptible power supply to continuously provide power to servers. The Prineville data center will use a new, patent-pending UPS system that reduces electricity usage by as much as 12 percent.

When a large percentage of the world is using your product, you want to make sure it stays up. Facebook is now taking that reliability into its own hands.

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